


Treat Me Like the Sea

by thatsrightdollface



Category: Homestuck
Genre: (it's pretty small though), Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Cryptic Ocean Magic, M/M, One Specific Epilogue Reference I'm tagging just in case lol, Shapeshifting Seagoat Gamzee, Swearing, the Empress is hunting Karkat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-09
Updated: 2020-07-09
Packaged: 2021-03-05 05:40:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25169347
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsrightdollface/pseuds/thatsrightdollface
Summary: “Well, treat me like the sea, oh-so salty and mean, a-ha-ha!” — “March Into the Sea,” Modest MouseKarkat escapes to the ocean.  He meets someone strange, there.
Relationships: Gamzee Makara & Karkat Vantas, Gamzee Makara/Karkat Vantas, by the end - Relationship, with descriptions of future
Comments: 14
Kudos: 33





	Treat Me Like the Sea

**Author's Note:**

> Okay so full disclosure:  
> 1\. Gamzee is referred to as “the wretched jester” at one point in the epilogue’s Candy route, and I decided it sounded like a good name for a tavern. That’s the “specific epilogue reference” I’m talking about in the tags.  
> 2\. I decided a while back that a fun game/challenge for myself might be to try and write a story referencing every song on the album “We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank” by Modest Mouse. (Specific goal, I know, but....) This is fic 4 for that challenge hehehehe >:D I really wanted to reference the part of the song that goes, “Drag me out of the sea, and then teach me to breathe!” someplace, but it didn’t Feel Right. Maybe that’ll be another fic someday.  
> 3\. I think it’s weird Vriska and Eridan didn’t appear in this, being pirates, but... oops. 
> 
> Thank you so much for reading!!! I'm sorry for anything and everything I might've messed up, here. I hope you’re staying safe and doing as well as possible.

I.

There was an anchor hanging above the door in the Wretched Jester’s tavern, gritty with sea salt and old sand, long-hardened ocean slime and barnacles. The metalwork was still pretty fancy, truth be told — Karkat hadn’t realized it at first, until he was trying to slip out of that tavern all discreetly to avoid a bar fight and some asshole got hurtled mercilessly against the wall, loosening that fucking anchor so that it almost split his skull clean open. Dried seaweed and skull shards; rust and gloppy dripping brains. Karkat gagged something very eloquent and staggered out of the way just in time, somehow; the anchor left a splintery hole in the tavern’s waterlogged floorboards that might never be fixed, so far as he knew. But the metalwork _was_ beautiful. There was a grinning seagoat winding its way around the anchor, head tossed back like it was cackling its way through a frantic storm. Or like it was raging?

Hard to say.

But the anchor got hung back above the door for a few more long years after that. It was crooked, up there, and as badly cared for as the old boardwalk people fell through, sometimes, that everybody said was haunted by a little kid with a paper boat. Karkat barely thought about the thing, after it nearly killed him. Probably no one really thought about the anchor, in much the same way as people didn’t usually think about sand castles once the ocean’d whittled them away, shredding seaweed banners and stealing shell candelabras piece-by-piece. The anchor hung there, wild and unknowable, until Karkat needed to get away so badly he was shaking, so badly he almost couldn’t string the thought together anymore. He needed a boat, and he needed a working sail, and he needed... yeah. He needed supplies, and a real pair of boots, and an anchor if he could afford it. A brand new anchor would be too expensive, but that one on the wall in the tavern didn’t seem like it had anything better to do. Karkat bought it. Or really, Mr. Xoloto who ran the place practically gave it to him: he knew why Karkat needed _out_. He knew the Empress who was hunting him. Mr. Xoloto’s hands dripped with oily gold rings, anyway, and he had rubies hung around his neck like a slit throat. It wasn’t as if he needed the cash. 

Maybe Mr. Xoloto knew what he was doing, when he let Karkat haul that anchor away. Word around town was he usually knew a lot more than his wide-thrown arms and casual banter let on. When Mr. Xoloto strummed a little on his old mandolin and sang, the whole fucking town got shitfaced in his tavern, spilling out into the streets and rowdy until morning. Could’ve been he knew what sort of creature he’d had smiling over his door all those years. 

Karkat would wonder about it later, sure, after it was much too late to ask any questions. He said, “Thanks, Xoloto,” in a gruff, reluctant whisper. And Mr. Xoloto said, “Aw, no problem, buddy,” with a big old smile. 

Karkat left town that night, from the old boardwalk, with only that lonely ghost-kid and the paper boat waving goodbye to him. Good thing, too. Wouldn’t be long before somebody kicked his door down, see; wouldn’t be too long until those creaking mechanical drones, all screeching gears and benevolently smiling carved wooden faces, Empress-beautiful, started out over the water to find him. It wasn’t anything in particular Karkat had done that made them want to bring his heart back to their creator, a heart gone sea-salty and withered, by then. Nah. It had been decided by something stupid. The sort of thing that gave people nightmares, glad they didn’t share Karkat’s family name. It felt like struggling against it would be as impossible as fighting the tides, but Karkat still ran. Probably Mr. Xoloto knew he wanted an anchor so badly not _only_ so he could stop by other seaside towns for fresh water and dried meat... probably Mr. Xoloto knew an old, well-made anchor like this one could bash in at least one drone’s whirring gears, cracking at least one carved wooden face into pieces. Probably Mr. Xoloto could taste the poison of it all, once Karkat’s name had been released in a royal decree alongside so many other undesirables. Once Karkat’s face started getting scribbled out in half-hearted ink on Wanted posters farther inland. 

Karkat had worked as a fisherman for one of the major companies in his town, for years and years and years. He knew his way around a mast, around the currents. But once he got out into the deep ocean, of course the world became stranger. He had known it would, obviously: this was where maps got crooked, where people drew monsters. There were creatures with impossible, unnumbered tentacles reaching just beneath him, sometimes; there were phantom ships pulling themselves along against the wind, with bones hanging from their limp sails like cracked-apart and rattling flags. But out here, in this place without roads, maybe he could hide for a little while. They said there was a different kingdom, all the way across the ocean... past all the skeleton-ships, of course, and through the aching doldrums where no winds blew. Empress Meenah Peixes was hunting Karkat, but maybe her sister Feferi Peixes would shelter him. It was worth a shot. The twin queens had been separated long ago, and it was said that although their faces were almost indistinguishable they were as different as the oceans themselves, frozen arctic and coral reefs, swollen drowned corpses and sun on the water. So it was said, anyway. 

It wasn’t until Karkat had been out at sea three days that he noticed something strange about his anchor: every time the waves crested up over the edges of his ship, the seagoat seemed to shift and stretch. That was ridiculous, wasn’t it? That was an old sailor’s story, the kind Karkat himself would’ve scoffed at. Yeah, keep talking, dumbass. So the seagoat’s eyes seemed to get softer, sleepier, looking at you. Uh-huh. So you could’ve sworn its crooked snakelike tail curled _differently_ around the anchor, as time dragged on. 

If you’re gonna lie, at least make it believable, right?

Karkat ignored the strangeness of it all as well as he could, until one day when he heaved the anchor up out of the surf _the seagoat was absolutely gone._ At first he thought it was just a trick of the light, just the glare of sun on the waves making him squint. But it wasn’t, he would swear it, now, like any other person who had given themself to the ocean might back in Mr. Xoloto’s tavern, seasalt crust in his beard. “I’m telling you, the seagoat disappeared, and the anchor was just a plain old thing with rust leaking like blood on the side of my ship. I swear it by my good eye.”

By the scar across my middle, from where one of the Empress’s drones almost gutted me. 

By the ocean itself, salty and mean and hungry, like a huge laughing mouth with broken teeth-rocks jutting around us here and there. 

You know. 

The seagoat was gone, and Karkat found himself staring down into the depths beneath his boat, wondering if maybe he could find the poor metal thing there and fish it out. He might have missed the seagoat, just then: his one friend, out here where he couldn’t stop in any town for longer than a day or so, out here where the island towns themselves were getting rarer all the time. But then a slow, shuddery surge of adrenaline snaked down his back, reaching for the tips of his fingers, making him feel suddenly very cold. Cold, under the relentless sun. Cold, even now.

It was as if something were watching him, except when Karkat turned around he found himself completely alone. Just rippling sea sprawling in all directions, glinting cheerfully in the light. 

There was nothing around... but even so, Karkat felt eyes on him, and every creak in his ship might’ve been something brushing up against the wooden boards from underneath. 

“Uh — hello?” Karkat called to the open sea, but of course nothing fucking answered him. “Whatever the hell you are... just leave me alone. Got that? Just leave me the fuck alone! I don’t need anything else to go wrong, okay? I don’t need any mysteries, I don’t need any hauntings, I don’t need —!”

Karkat cut off. He hadn’t needed his name to come up underlined in red by the Empress’s hand, to begin with; he hadn’t needed weeks out at sea, getting dizzier day by day, getting used to the sunburn twinge of movement, getting used to going ages without speaking aloud, just muttering sourly down at his own rope-burns as he worked. There were tears prickling at the edges of Karkat’s eyes as he screamed to the ocean, screamed to the seagoat. He needed to scream for days, until he was choking on blood that tasted uncannily like salt water. He needed something new to hate. What was one more wrongness, now that everything had gone wrong? What the actual fuck was watching him?

Karkat was shaking. He hurried away from that place, as fast as the winds would carry him. He both knew and didn’t know that the seagoat followed him, winding alongside his boat, bits of rust flaking off its sinuous body as it moved. Sometimes he caught a glimpse of it out of the corner of his eye and told himself it had to be something else. The seagoat’s scales were white like sea foam. White like bone. 

II.

For the next while, Karkat swore at the seagoat even when he couldn’t see it — he snarled down at his half-ruined map as he worked to chart his course, and he had rude things to say about the stars, about everything. He‘d heard enough stories about cursed deep sea beasts to know that the seagoat could decide to tip his boat over any one of these days, if he started to smell sort of tasty and there wasn’t any more interesting prey around. Sea beasts were capricious like that: only fools trusted them. Think about sirens, and fish-folk with bits of sailor caught between their teeth. Think of drowned pirates returned home, but come back _different_ , choking salt water out with their smiles, sloshing as they walked and hoping to drown you, too, so you could be together for all time. 

Karkat told the seagoat about all these very logical reasons why it was bad news that his anchor had been cursed, or whatever the fuck was going on here — Karkat told the seagoat he was already afraid enough, even without imagining himself chasing after shadows among the waves, trying to harpoon a monster that was hunting him but had, oh, I don’t know, _an entire ocean to hide in_. The more Karkat talked to the seagoat, the stronger his voice got, honestly. He deserved to be furious, after all. None of this had been fair, and at least when he told the seagoat about it nothing contradicted him. Gulls circled above them both, screeching at the hollow blue sky. The seagoat wound in lazy spirals through the dark ocean, smiling at already-wrecked ships, listening.

After a while, Karkat said, “I guess I never told you my name, did I?” and even though the seagoat didn’t answer, Karkat announced it. Karkat Vantas. That last name there? That’s why the Empress wanted to kill him. Don’t ask: the explanation‘s fucking stupid... almost as stupid as spilling his guts out to a fish-brained goat creature that used to be part of some old bard’s anchor. The world had just dissolved into stupidity, by now, like a long-lost sailor melting into the sea. 

After a while, Karkat said, “If you _do_ decide to eat me, I won’t go down easily. I hope you know that. If you decide to eat me, I’ll carve my way out of your stomach... I’ll twist a rope out of your intestines and drag my way back to the surface.” Silence, of course. Karkat offered up some colorful metaphors, but even his grisliest descriptions of _what exactly he could do to the seagoat_ didn’t mean a whole lot when night came. If the seagoat decided to eat him, he could squish Karkat apart with one chomp of his grinning fangs. He could be slithering so close, just now — close enough to reach down and brush the barnacles worked between some of his scales — but Karkat wouldn’t even know it. 

Karkat told stories about what things had been like back in his old town... about what he’d wanted to make of his life, before the Empress found him and realized she‘d rather he died. Karkat told stories he’d heard in Mr. Xoloto’s tavern, the Wretched Jester: love stories and broken-heart stories, that sort of thing. Karkat had always assumed he’d fall in love, one day. He’d always assumed he‘d die with someone else knowing him, really, and wanting to hold him close. Sometimes he could’ve sworn the seagoat drifted near the surface of the ocean, then, to hear him better — it looked like there were words carved into the creature’s horns, and for the first time Karkat caught himself wondering if maybe the seagoat got tired, following him from day to day to day. How would a sea beast like this have lived normally? Did the goat-fish-monster want to sleep in some cave or whatever, sideways-hourglass eyes softly closed? Did seagoats belong in an underwater city, or a ship graveyard, or a frozen ocean so far from here Karkat couldn’t even completely imagine it? Where the fuck had Mr. Xoloto gotten this anchor, anyway?

Karkat didn’t get answers to any of those questions until after the Empress’s drones caught up with him, him and his almost-ally, his not-quite-friend beneath the sea. They came at his boat from all sides, like whirring mechanical claws curling into a fist around him. They shot his ship full of holes before he even got a chance to club one of them apart with the anchor he’d brought. It happened so quickly, in the middle of the day. Someone had recognized Karkat in a port city he’d stopped at nights before. Someone had given him away for a handful of gold and a pat on the head. 

It might have been over too soon, you know. There were dozens of drones, each with a figurehead-face watching Karkat with the Empress’s own eyes. She was winking, and sneering, and cheering, and cursing. She was everywhere, and Karkat was cornered in the middle of a clear empty day. No wind to save him; not enough time or strength to row away. He could shoot some of the Empress’s drones out of the sky, sure, but the ammo never lasted forever. In the end, Karkat could only scream. 

“Okay, you dumb, ridiculous fish!” Karkat bellowed to the seagoat. “If I die today, don’t let these things take me! I’d rather the ocean have me than the Empress! I’d rather you fucking eat me than lose to her — I’d rather —”

Karkat didn’t finish that last thought, there, because it was around then when... impossible, big-fish story that it was, yeah, believe me, Karkat knew... the storm came. The seagoat brought rage, churning out of the deep unforgiving ocean. The seagoat laughed, and the waves seemed to laugh, too, a howling, unrepentant sound. The sky curled with swollen purple clouds, like wine stains on silk, like spreading bruises. The waves turned grey and frantic, like someone had put the screaming theater mask on, suddenly, tucking the playfully smiling one behind their back. Rage, in the sea, meant lightning and the sort of crashing ocean that could catch drones up and crunch them apart, scattering gears like spilled coins from a pirate’s chest. Rage, in the sea, meant a shrieking wind Karkat couldn’t hear through, couldn’t see through — it meant an absolute certainty that here, right now, he could drown. He could drown, but maybe he wouldn’t. He had announced that he would rather trust the sea, as capricious and unknowable as it was, and when the storm came...

Heh. 

When the storm came, Karkat survived it. He knew he had been _meant_ to survive it, in the same distracted, distant way he remembered his dreams. He knew the words carved on that seagoat’s horns had been some sort of prayer; he knew the sea had its priests the same way it had hungers and secrets. He knew it was perfectly possible Marvus Xoloto had known what he was doing when he offered over that seagoat anchor nearly free of charge. 

Karkat knew... when the storm cleared, and his boat was a battered heap of rags and helpless boards... that he recognized the man who stood at that waterlogged helm with him. Panic and superstition aside, of course Karkat recognized him. He still had words carved into his twisting horns, after all, and sideways-hourglass eyes — it wasn’t like he was trying too hard to hide himself. He _also_ had long, tangled-curling hair, and mother-of-pearl scales between his fingers, and a tired edge to his relieved, goofy smile.

When the man collapsed into Karkat’s arms, he could have shoved him over into the deep, or slit his throat with a bit of broken drone, or used that anchor to smash his ribs. Gotten rid of this sea beast, once and for all. But I think we both know Karkat didn’t do anything of the sort. 

Karkat brushed a little of the seagoat’s dripping hair out of his eyes, and kept the sun off him as he slept. He seemed to have nightmares, twitching there among the wreckage of Karkat’s ship and the Empress’s ruined soldiers — Karkat patted his arm awkwardly, and studied the old-fashioned leathery suit he wore. The twirling somersault of an insignia on his lapel; the clownish polka dots, the mildewed lace. He didn’t realize that by the end of his journey, he would be holding the seagoat as he slept, more often than not — who could have ever realized something like that? This man’s joints bent differently than a human’s did, but his mouth hung open a little as he slept, too. So weirdly vulnerable, for a sea beast. Dangerous and capricious; maybe faithful and alone. The sea was a contradiction, wasn’t it? Terrifying and full of life. Maybe Karkat wouldn’t exactly want to leave it, not completely, not even once he got where he was going.

When he woke up, the seagoat asked, “So, we’re... we’re all going to Feferi Peixes's kingdom, right, brother?” like he and Karkat had been best friends for a long time. His voice was soft and low, gravelly like it hadn’t been used in ages, and sing-song as the ebb and flow of waves on a beach. Instead of telling him to fuck off back into the ocean, Karkat sighed and said, “Yeah, I guess we are,” and got him to eat some dried fish. 

The seagoat’s fangs were long and hollow looking, like certain translucent deep sea serpents. He said his name was Gamzee, and that people in the know called his species “Makaras,” not “Dumb, Ridiculous Fish.” He would answer Karkat’s questions, before they made it to the softer kingdom on the other side of the sea. _Most_ of Karkat’s questions, anyway, and he would drag treasure up from sunken places to pay for a new boat and plenty more supplies. He would ask Karkat to talk to him again — to tell him stories, again — sometimes, and his eyes would get calm. He would lean over the edge of the ship, long hair blowing around him like unbrushed stormclouds, dry for the first time in his life... or he might disappear into the dark water, appearing only every now and then as a flash of bone-white scales. Circling the ship, like he used to. 

Later, Gamzee would wrap his spindly-cold deep sea arms around Karkat’s waist and pull him back, so that Karkat’s head could rest in the crook of his neck as he talked. Grounding him, like an anchor, right? Karkat would let him, after enough time passed. Can you believe it? Gamzee’s fangs would be so close, then, but the Empress would be farther and farther away.


End file.
